The debate over wearing a poppy

A provocative piece in Britain’s Independent newspaper by longtime foreign affairs correspondent Robert Fisk is making the social media rounds this week. It’s about why Fisk, a man who has seen more than his share of war in his life, refuses to wear a poppy on Remembrance Day.

It stems from the disillusionment felt by his father, a veteran of the First World War, and his anger at what he saw as a misappropriation of the symbol by people who wear it for the wrong reasons.

Fisk writes:

In hospital and recovering from cancer, I asked him once why the Great War was fought. “All I can tell you, fellah,” he said, “was that it was a great waste.” And he swept his hand from left to right. Then he stopped wearing his poppy. I asked him why, and he said that he didn’t want to see “so many damn fools” wearing it – he was a provocative man and, sadly, I fell out with him in his old age. What he meant was that all kinds of people who had no idea of the suffering of the Great War – or the Second, for that matter – were now ostentatiously wearing a poppy for social or work-related reasons, to look patriotic and British when it suited them, to keep in with their friends and betters and employers. These people, he said to me once, had no idea what the trenches of France were like, what it felt like to have your friends die beside you and then to confront their brothers and wives and lovers and parents.

One correspondent of mine (who generally shares Fisk’s politics), in discussing the piece, takes issue with what he considers a flawed assumption: that those who wear a poppy can’t honour the sacrifice of our war dead without simultaneously honouring war itself. He argues that while he hates war, he can still wear a poppy “to honour men like (Fisk’s) father’s friends and my grandmother’s brothers and the many more who died in the great war.”

Yet another thread through Fisk’s piece is the thought that unless you were there, you don’t deserve to indulge in “remembrance.” He includes himself in this group. Please — with Remembrance Day upon us, share your thoughts in the comments section below.